[VT_Dude]

Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference.

https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/

[dmix]

I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers.

It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s

I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.

[Mediterraneo10]

This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.

[Dah00n]

Unless you have bad hearing everyone would be able to hear the difference on speakers and live unless live is defined as someone playing far away on a scene or something, no matter how expensive equipment you have. It is impossible to have it sound like musicians playing in the same room. To even come close you would need several speakers per instrument playing in multiple directions and some playing sounds of the people moving, breathing and talking too. Not even a simple snare drum being hit at intervals can be reproduced by a normal stereo setup to sound as if it were in the same room unless it's at distance. Remember, we play music at home so the definition should be an orchestra two to three meters away, not an orchestra ten to twenty meters away up at a scene.

Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.